Ruffle Sleeve Top in Protea Fabric
Beautiful backdrop and photo by Kaytie Rich Photography
Gosh its been a while since I’ve written a blog post! I fully intended on doing this more often, but life is busy!
I’ve just finished making the Ruffle Sleeve Top by In The Folds which is available for free (yes you heard that right!) from the Peppermint Mag website with my Protea fabric (purchase here). With each issue of Peppermint Mag they team up with a pattern designer to provide a free sewing pattern for all their readers. I’ve made a bunch of these free sewing patterns and they are all great!
I wore my new top to my sisters baby shower on the weekend. It’s pretty and super comfy!
The Ruffle Sleeve Top was a great make. I got the AO size file printed at Officeworks for $10 so I didn’t have to stick A4 pages together (I hate that part of PDF patterns). I felt the cost was worth it considering I didn’t pay for the sewing pattern. The instructions were easy to understand. It took me 4 sessions to make because I was trying to fit it into small amounts of time but it would probably only take a few hours if I sat down and did it from start to finish. This make includes darts, gathering and understitching and I LOVE LOVE LOVE that this pattern shows you how to finish your seams with french seams! French seams are where you sew the seam once, trim the edges then fold the fabric over the raw edges and sew the seam again enclosing the raw edge. It’s a really professional finish that allows garments to last a lot longer as the seams don’t fray.
I am so happy with how the finished garment looks. It is a loose fit and If I were to make another I would probably go one size down but other than that, I love it!
I made the Ruffle Sleeve Top in one of my own designs, the Protea fabric. This fabric is available via Next State Print. I’ve recently released a bunch of my designs with Next State (a fabric printing company in Melbourne) so anyone can purchase them by the metre. Click here to check out all my designs. There are so many base cloths to choose from including a great natural and organic selection for furnishings to fashion. For this top I had the Protea design printed on Classic Cotton which is organic and has a slight sheen to it similar to cotton sateen. Next State’s printing quality is amazing, I’ve used their services for many years for my own products and have always been happy with the quality. One of the great things about printing my designs through them is that I design very large scale prints, however Next State allows you to use a slider to adjust the scale of my designs to suit your needs. So if you are doing large scale homewares you can keep it large. Or if you are making women’s clothing you could scale it down a bit or you can even scale it down very small to suit baby clothing. If you want to make the same top in the same fabric and scale, then click here and follow the instructions below.
Scale: Slide the slider down until the green box says 822ppi
Arrangement: keep default repeat
Choose your cut: linear metre
Fabric: Classic Cotton
Quantity: I bought 2 metres but the fabric is 140cm wide which is a different width to the suggestions in the instructions. I made size E and and I had half a metre left over. So if you are size E or smaller I would order 1.6 or 1.7m just to be safe. However, if the size is any bigger you will need more fabric.
I love the finished product and the process of making it. I hope you do too!